Differential steering vehicle dynamics control with rule-based fault-tolerant control strategy

In this paper, a rule-based fault-tolerant control strategy is proposed to improve the vehicle’s yaw stability as well as the dynamics of a six-wheel differential vehicle when the hub-motor drive system fails due to a variety of unpredictable factors during driving. Meanwhile, to address the problem of easy deterioration of dynamic control due to parameter uncertainty and actuator saturation in the vehicle motion system, an anti-saturation integral control is designed based on the Lyapunov method so as to ensure the accurate tracking of the reference signal by the vehicle. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, four typical working conditions are designed in this paper to test the proposed fault-tolerant control strategy, including the straight driving working condition and forward steering working condition with unilateral motor failure, and the straight driving working condition and forward steering working condition with bilateral motor failure. The results show that in the four operating conditions, the error extremum of the center of mass lateral angle and yaw rate of the fault-tolerant control method was reduced by more than 79% compared to the error extremum of the center of mass lateral angle and yaw rate of the no fault-tolerant control method, this indicates that the rule-based fault-tolerant control strategy proposed in this article can effectively suppress the interference caused by partial drive system failures.